How to Regrow the Soul's Wings
From the fall to the flight of the Soul, piloted by the intellect, the Soul's internal eye.
As I’ve expounded in my previous article, Nietzsche and Hegel have homologous ideas regarding the fact that the soul can fly. I believe that both of them get this from Plato, who two thousand years before, spoke of the soul as a flying entity.
Blessed with Madness from the Heavens
In the Phaedrus, Plato distinguishes between two types of madness. One is the madness of disease and mental derangement, a human kind. The other one is divine madness. This latter type of madness comes to us “as the gift of heaven”, which he says “is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings.”1
Divine madness is necessitated in the creation of beautiful art, which cannot come to fruition with a mere familiarity of the technical prerequisites of any form of art. The disturbing and awe-inspiring art-work comes to us from madmen who are inspired by divinity and utterly outperform the creations of the sane man.
Besides making great art possible, wisdom and love alike cannot exist without divine madness. Firstly, wisdom is not at all cleverness, the sober-sense of an uninspired and down-to-earth man. Wisdom is the result of a long journey that requires the rigour of hard work, an extended period of learning, or initiation, which is only possible with a humble openheartedness.
Secondly, love is not only one of the types of divine madness, as Socrates2 tells us in the dialogue; “It is for us […] to show that this type of madness is the greatest benefit that heaven can confer on us.”3
Now, what is this divine madness called love? All we can do here is give some preliminary intimations to the answer. Love is not love without the fall. Plato in the Phaedrus goes into a myth to describe the birth of the human as the result of a falling soul which loses its wings. In that sense, the divine madness of love, or love as the soulful god, is inseparable from the soul’s fall.
“I” — the Immortal Soul
As described in the Phaedrus, the soul has two aspects. Firstly, it is the cause of its own motion. Secondly, it is immortal, by virtue of it being its own self-caused motion, as its sole self-derivation. Its motion is its life, and it’s this life which causes other objects to move. This is why Plato calls it a prime origin. The soul being of an immortal nature is a necessary conclusion according to Plato that he will draw from the fact that if the soul were to stop moving, it would have to be because of the fact that some external movement that made it move in the first place would cease. This cannot be the case, as we’ve defined the soul to be that which moves out of its own accord, and hence it is nothing but that immortal self-movement. A body that moves only as a result of external causes is therefore soulless.
Socrates, humble as he is, tells Phaedrus that: ”To describe it [the soul] as it is would require a long exposition of which only a god is capable; but it is within the power of man to say in shorter compass what it resembles.”4 Because soul, ψυχή in Greek, or what Hegel calls the “I” or concept, is responsible for all that is soulless, or spiritless nature, it traverses any kind of intelligible totality, which is its starting-point. In the dialogue, Plato uses a myth to communicate the nature of the soul, its perfection, subsequent fall, and return to flight:
"[Socrates:] Soul taken as a whole is in charge of all that is inanimate, and traverses the entire universe, appearing at different times in different forms. When it is perfect and winged it moves on high and governs all creation, but the soul that shed its wings falls until it encounters solid matter."5
By falling into the body, the soul sheds its perfect state of flight above creation. To come into creation, is to become in the realm of imperfection, which is the result of the loss of the soul’s wings. Alas, this is not to be lamented, as this prior state of perfection that Plato gets at here serves as a mythical reference-point that has no reality of its own if it was not for it being retroactively posited, whereby it is established to be an uncreated state of existence prior to and apart from the fallen world. It is only by the soul’s fall that it becomes aware of its (potentiality of) flight. To understand what it can possibly mean for the soul to fly we are to take into account that:
“[Socrates:] The function of a wing is to take what is heavy and raise it up to the region above, where the gods dwell; of all things connected with the body, it has the greatest affinity with the divine, which is endowed with beauty, wisdom, goodness and every other excellence. These qualities are the prime source of nourishment and growth of the wings of the soul, but their opposite, such as ugliness and evil, cause the wings to waste and perish.”6
In the myth, Plato tells of the soul as a flying charioteer with two horses, one of them of a virtuous nature, the other one of a vicious nature. In the flight of the soul in the heavens, prior to the state of creation, the vicious horse forces the charioteer down by throwing all his weight toward the earth, resulting in the birth of the human being, commencing all the agony and strife that his earthly existence entails. The immanence of the region where the gods dwell, as a transcendent realm of spirit, is the same as what Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra speaks of:
”Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughing. Up, let us kill the spirit of gravity! I learned to walk, since then I let myself run. I learned to fly, since then I do not wait to be pushed to move from the spot. Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath me, now a god dances through me.”7
Get refuted and Recollect to Purify and Fly
How do we learn how to fly again? On the outset, we can begin by recollecting this region of the gods, the summit of the souls, as the pursuit of the truth which we call philosophy, a strenuous spiritual labour. This path confronts the soul with refutation after refutation, i.e. the purification necessary to go beyond what one takes to be the true, since it will inevitably be revealed to be erroneous, Socrates states;
“Nevertheless the fact is this, for we must have the courage to speak the truth, especially when the truth itself is our theme. The region of which I speak is the abode of the reality with which true knowledge is concerned, a reality without color or shape, intangible but utterly real, apprehensible only by intellect which is the pilot of the soul. So the mind of a god, sustained as it is by pure intelligence and knowledge, like that of every soul which is destined to assimilate its proper food, is satisfied at last with the vision of reality, and nourished and made happy by the contemplation of truth, until its circular revolution brings it back to its starting-point. And in the course of its journey, it beholds absolute justice and discipline and knowledge, not the knowledge which varies with objects which we now call real, but the absolute knowledge which corresponds to what is absolutely real in the fullest sense.”8
Philosophy that aims at thinking true reality is beyond any mythical configurations that taint this reality of true knowledge with representations, although these may have a pedagogical function in one’s training. This ultimate reality is without color, shape, or any way in which the senses, or representations picture it. This true reality is above what these faculties deem to be real. Funnily enough, this realm of truth is intangible and invisible, while at the same time being perceptible, or more precisely, apprehensible. This absolute truth is to be beheld as a circular movement whereby the vision of real truth reconciles the soul, thus bringing it back to its starting-point. Absolute knowledge is this completed correspondence, the having gone full circle of the intellect, the point at which knowing and truth are equalized. The completion of this circle results in a return to its starting-point, which simultaneously opens up a new circle of becoming.
Restoring the Internal Eye’s Sight of Invisible Truth
How are we to think this metaphor of the invisibility of truth and the apprehension or beholding of it by the intellect as the pilot of the soul? Let’s take a look at what Plato’s most ambitious student, Aristotle, has said on the matter:
"This knowledge, [i.e. philosophical knowledge] is indeed contemplative, but it enables to frame all our practice in accordance with it. For just as sight makes and shapes nothing (since its only work is to judge and show us everything that can be seen), yet it enables us to act as it directs and gives us the greatest assistance towards action (for we should be entirely motionless of deprived of it), so it is clear that, though knowledge is contemplative, yet we do innumerable things in accordance with it, choose some things and avoid others, and in general gain as a result of it everything that is good."9
Philosophy is a taking up of the truth, a practice of knowledge and truth linked and distinguished in contemplation that does not externally impose representations on what is already there. It is a methodical discipline of self-thinking thought which is both a radically involved engagement that changes one’s essence, while also being an indifferent observation of that very process. The soul itself would be nothing if not for the truth of this self-same self-motion. For Plato, all movement that learns essential truth — which as we’ve seen is piloted by the intellect — is a recollection, an inwardization that brings the soul to the truth of the circularity of its becoming. This in turn lays the basis for bringing the subject to novel action, in accordance with thought. Action is not instructed directly by philosophical contemplation, which attests to the latter’s absolute freedom.
To delve deeper into the analogy between the eyes and philosophical contemplation, in the Science of Logic, Hegel will speak of the immediacy of thought, or the extreme simplicity of the concept, the directness of what is found in the succession of becoming, he said that “because of its immediacy [it] can also be called a supersensuous, inner intuiting.”10 We can’t find the truth of being out there, with sense and outer intuition, since
“[…] the difficulty of finding being in the concept in general, and equally so in the concept of God, becomes insuperable if we expect being to be something that we find in the context of external experience or in the form of sense-perception, like the one hundred dollars in the context of my finances, as something graspable only by hand, not by spirit, essentially visible to the external and not the internal eye; in other words, if the name of being, reality, truth, is given to that which things possess as a sensuous, temporal, and perishable. — The consequence of a philosophizing that in regard to being fails to raise above the senses is that, in regard to the concept, it also fails to let go of merely abstract thought; such thought stands opposed to being. “11
Thought is thus a beholding, or an inner intuiting done by the internal eye. The intellect, this internal eye of the soul, takes up what is there, does not impose external opinion on it that would change it, but by looking on, by inner intuiting, recollects the essence out of the immediate being. The external eye is caught up in sense-perception and the perishable semblances that for Plato, as well as Hegel, are below the realm of absolute, ideal truth.
Now, back to the true reality, and the question of how the soul is to regrow its wings. In the story, the intellect, prior to creation, beheld the absolute truth. The winged soul was borne aloft and nourished by the vision, and, somehow, in its circuiting, it eventually fell to the earth, becoming human. Plato tells us that it will take 10.000 years for the soul to fully regrow its wings and win its release. Fortunately, the soul which chooses the life of the philosopher three times successively can re-enter the bodiless state in just 3.000 years. How are we to interpret this? At the very least it’s clear that it will take a few deaths, a long time, and a soul dedicated to the pursuit of truth to regrow one’s wings. Some of the aspects of the process are described as follows:
"[Socrates:] It is impossible for a soul that has never seen the truth to enter into our human shape; it takes a man to understand by the use of universals, and to collect out of the multiplicity of sense-impressions a unity arrived at by a process of reason. Such a process is simply the recollection of the things which our soul once perceived when it took its journey with a god, looking down from above on the things to which we now ascribe reality and gazing upwards towards what is truly real. That is why it is right that the soul of the philosopher alone should regain its wings; for it is always dwelling in memory as best it may upon the things which a god owes his divinity to dwelling upon. It is only by the right use of such aids to recollection which form a continual initiation into the perfect mystic vision that a man can become perfect in the truest sense of the word. Because he stands apart from the common objects of human ambition and applies himself to the divine, he is reproached by most men for being out of his wits; they do not realize that he is in fact possessed by a god."12
To think, one puts aside the immediacy of sense-impression, thereby retreating back to the unity of the concept and its process of reason, which, again, is a process of recollection concerned with absolute truth, a divine activity of contemplation leading to the soul being initiated to the mystic vision of invisible circling. Some have forgotten that they themselves have not missed out of the vision, as all humans have;
“[Socrates:] but it is not every soul that finds it easy to use its present experience as a means of recollecting the world of reality. Some had but a brief glimpse of the truth in their former existence; others have been so unfortunate as to be corrupted by evil associations since they fell to earth, with the result that they have forgotten the sacred vision they once saw. Few are left who retain a sufficient memory. These, however, when they see some likeness of the world above, are beside themselves and lose all control, but do not realize what is happening to them because of the dimness of their perceptions.”13
There’s a few symptoms, one could say, of those who cannot ascend their souls to take off in flight. Perhaps the vision they had was too brief, or they’ve been corrupted since falling down, perhaps it’s an emotional resistance to uncovering oedipal truths which they consequently compulsively repeat in their lives. In any case, when they use their internal eye to intuit the real, it simply becomes overbearing to them, that is, the enveloping darkness or overwhelming illumination of the reverberating unknown makes them lose control. They lack the ability to return to the loss which can only be attained by losing oneself in the return. The return which does not have the nature of a regression, but a forward return to the self (as I’ve written on in this article).
Love Floods the Soul
With Emanations of Absolute Beauty
As we’ve mentioned, love is the supreme form of divine madness as Plato conceptualizes it in the Phaedrus. It’s a decision made in the vein of radical and free risk, its high-flownness leaves behind down-to-earthness:
“[Socrates: This] type of madness, which befalls when a man, reminded by the sight of beauty on earth of the true beauty, grows his wings and endeavours to fly upward, but in vain, exposing himself to the reproach of insanity because like a bird he fixes his gaze on the heights to the neglect of things below; and the conclusion to which our whole discourse points is that in itself and in its origin this its the best of all forms of divine possession, both for the subject himself and for his associate, and it is when he is touched with this madness that the man whose love is aroused by beauty in others is called a lover.”14
As is evident from the experience of falling in love, one, awakened by the emanation of the beloved’s beauty, neglects and becomes apathetic to the usual motions of one’s daily life. According to Plato, one is to keep in mind that one physically perceives the beloved, which is at most a shining intimation of true beauty. Is the beloved hence not truly beautiful? This is more ambiguous than it might seem. “Beauty on earth” is not merely a worthless copy of the true beauty, as will be clear in the following quote, which goes deeper into the phenomenon of falling in love and how it delightfully and painfully forces the soul to regrow its wings:
"[Socrates:] What overpowering love knowledge would inspire if it could bring as clear an image of itself before our sight, and the same may be said of the other forms which are fitted to arouse love. But as things are it is only beauty which has the privilege of being both the most clearly fresh discerned and the most lovely. Now the man who is not fresh from his initiation or who has been corrupted does not quickly make the transition from beauty on earth to absolute beauty; so when he sees its namesake here he feels no reverence for it, but surrenders himself to sensuality and is eager like a four-footed beast to make and to beget children, or in his addiction to wantonness feels no fear or shame in pursuing a pleasure which is unnatural. “15
Knowledge would be totally overpowering in inspiring love if it could bring forth an image of itself, for the outer eye to see. The reason behind this is that knowledge of the truth is the contemplative comprehension of the realm of the gods, the unity of the excellence of perfection. For Plato, philosophy is the journey of initiation to come to the state of having fully regrown the soul’s wings.
Is the transition one makes to absolute beauty, in the reverence of the beloved, sexless? Not quite, later on in the dialogue Plato jokingly speaks about allowing oneself to indulge in the enjoyment of the charioteer’s vicious horse. However, the premature surrender to the raw immediacy of sex reveals a lack of reverence to the beloved according to Plato. To him, sex without love is a cold, needy and calculative vice that breeds ignoble qualities in the soul. Nevertheless, both in Plato’s as in our time, the multitude will extol those qualities as virtuous. Mediating the object of desire by plunging into unsublimated libidinal attachment is not to be condemned for the sake of morality, though it will likely inhibit one to make the transition to absolute beauty, according to him. Whether this is possible, is a question to be asked only after having more clarity on the exact meaning of this transition as regards the question of love.
Like we’ve said, it does not suffice to demote the representation of beauty to a worthless copy. Plato believes it’s the privilege of those souls who have fully seen the vision that allow them to make worthwhile judgement on earthly beauty pointing to its beyond:
“But the newly initiated, who has had a fully sight of the celestial vision when he beholds a god-like face or a physical form which truly reflects ideal beauty, first of all shivers and experiences something of the dread which the vision itself inspired; next he gazes upon it and worships it as if it were a god, and, if he were not afraid of being thought an utter madman, he would sacrifice to this beloved as to the image of a divinity. Then, as you would expect after a cold fit, his condition changes and he falls into an unaccustomed sweat; he receives through his eyes the emanation of beauty, by which the soul's plumage is fostered, and grows hot, and this heat is accompanied by a softening of the passages from which the feathers grow, passages which have long been parched and closed up, so as to prevent any feathers from shooting. As the nourishing moisture falls upon it the stump of each feather under the whole surface of the soul swells and strives to grow from its root; for in its original state the soul was feathered all over. So now it is all in a state of ferment and throbbing; in fact the soul of a man who is beginning to grow his feathers has the same sensation of pricking and irritation and itching as children feel in their gums when they are just beginning to cut their teeth."16
Shivering, worshipping, sweating, a desire for sacrifice — these are all the symptoms of a soul which by falling in love is slowly regrowing its wings. This madness opens up and softens the closed off passages of the soul’s surface, while one is flooded by the emanations of beauty. To gaze upon the beauty of the beloved relieves the pain of longing and makes the soul glad. On the other hand, the passages where the feathers are supposed to shoot up can close up through separation, caused by a drought which prevents new growth. The precision and beauty of the following part of the text, a continuation of the last passage, merits to be quoted in full:
"Imprisoned below the surface together with the flood of longing of which I have spoken, each embryo feather throbs like a pulse and presses against its proper outlet, so that the soul is driven mad by the pain of the pricks in every part, and yet feels gladness because it preserves the memory of the beauty of its darling. In this state of mingled pleasure and pain the sufferer is perplexed by the strangeness of his experience and struggles helplessly; in his frenzy he cannot sleep at night or remains still by day, but his longing drives him wherever he thinks that he may see the possessor of beauty. When he sees him and his soul is refreshed by the flood of emanations the closed passages are unstopped; he obtains a respite from his pains and pangs, and there is nothing to equal the sweetness of the pleasure which he enjoys for the moment. From this state he never willingly emerges; in his eyes no one can compare with his beloved; mother, brothers, friends, are all forgotten, and if his property is lost through his negligence he thinks nothing of it; the conventions of civilized behavior, on whose observance he used to pride himself, he now scorns; he is ready to be a slave and to make his bed as near as he is allowed to the object of his passion; for besides the reverence which he feels for the possessor of beauty he has found in him the only physician for sickness of the most grievous kind. This sickness, let me inform the handsome lad who I am supposed to be addressing, men call eros, but the gods have a name for it which in his youthful ignorance he will probably laugh at. There are two lines on love quote by the admirers of Homer from the apocryphal works, of which the second is highly bizarre and not free from defects from metre. They go as follows:
Eros the god that flies is his name in the language of mortals:
But from the wings he must grow he is called by celestials Pteros."17
To summarize, love as a type of divine madness is a massively ambiguous, confusing state which is hypnotizing and unbearable and excruciating and exhilarating. The mystical nature of this divine madness which opens up one’s soul and forcefully makes one regrow their wings is the possession by the god of love, Pteros, derived from πτερον, meaning wing.
The Sickening Cure &
The Blinding Eternity of Jouissance
How does the beloved cure the lover from his illness? The heart is flooded and brims over, leading to the return of the stream of beauty to the source in the beloved: “It enters in at his eyes, the natural channel of communication of the soul, and reaching and arousing the soul moistens the passages from which the feathers shoot and stimulates the growth of wings, and in turn the soul of the beloved is filled with love."18 The flow of love, going from soul to soul, through the eyes, can of course be understood in some kind of supernatural sense, as an illusory and obsolete conception that is not in touch with reality. Yet, as Žižek says:
“First, love cannot be reduced to a mere illusion or imaginary phenomenon: beyond its fascination with the image of its object, true love aims at the kernel of the real, at what is in the object more than the object itself, in short, at what Lacan called objet petit a. Love—as well as hate—is supported by what remains of the object when it is stripped of all its imaginary and symbolic features. Secondly, love is therefore an inherently historical phenomenon: its concrete configurations are so many (ultimately failed) attempts to gentrify, tame, symbolize, the "unhistorical" traumatic kernel of jouissance that makes the object unbearable.”19
Love, the god Pteros, is not reducible to the emanation of the image. Its beauty, which is perceptible as the image, must be stripped off to see it for what it truly is. Yet this stripping off, rids it at the same time of its appearance, or appears itself as its non-appearance, a redoubled appearance perceptible only to the internal eye. This god is above all comprehensible in the truth of knowing, as absolute knowing. However, there is no discourse that is not a semblance of truthful comprehension of impossibility. This impossibility is the traumatic and “unhistorical” or eternal kernel qua jouissance, which is the core of the soul’s immortal self-motion. As is clear from the Phaedo, Plato couldn’t agree more with Žižek, and speaks to the unbearable impossibility of jouissance himself:
“[Socrates:] When I had given up inquiring into real existence, he proceeded, I thought that I must take care that I did not suffer as people do who look at the sun during an eclipse. For they are apt to lose their eyesight, unless they look at the sun’s reflection in water or such medium. That danger occurred to me. I was afraid that my soul might be completely blinded if I looked at things with my eyes, and tried to grasp them with my senses. So I thought that I must have recourse to conceptions, and examine the truth of existence by means of them.”20
Does this recourse to the concept, or retreat from the senses and their overwhelmingly blinding modes of jouissance entail a step back from the engagement with truth? In other words, is the concept lesser than the senses in relation to the grasp of real existence? This cannot be the case, because philosophy is in the business of truth, and thus does not live up to its own notion if one does not have the courage to assume the strongest principles or thoughts insofar as one thinks them out to their agreement with truth, as well as having the strength of seeing the persistence of the concept in refutation. Falling in love would, to Plato, be meaningless if it does not stimulate the higher nature of the lover’s soul to prevail upwards, that higher nature which pushes him to pursue wisdom and take off in flight. Love sets one free from established convention, which, along with the philosophical journey, empowers the soul to regrow its wings.
Plato, Phaedrus. Penguin Books p. 46.
In what way Plato uses Socrates in his dialogues as his own mouth-piece is not of interest in this article. All passages I extract are from what Socrates says, and insofar as they convey important truth, I make use of it.
Ibid. p. 48.
Ibid. p. 50.
Ibid. p. 51.
Ibid. p. 51.
Nietzsche, F. W. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge University Press. p. 154
Plato, Phaedrus. Penguin Books p. 53.
Aristotle, Fragments, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume II. Princeton University Press. p. 34.
Hegel, G.W.F. Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press. p. 738.
Ibid. p. 627.
Plato, Phaedrus. Penguin Books p. 56.
Ibid. p. 56.
Ibid. p. 57.
Ibid. p. 57.
Ibid. p. 58.
Ibid. p. 59.
Ibid. p. 64.
Salecl, R. & Žižek, S. gaze and voice as love objects. Duke University Press. p. 3
Plato, Phaedo. The Liberal Arts Press. p. 52